My Neighbors Are Yard-Sign Fighting

The suburbs are a constant Simpsons bit.

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Frinkiac

Last week while I was out for a walk in my neighborhood, I passed by a house with a lawn sign that said “Trump For Prison 2024.” I noticed it immediately, since yard signs are fairly rare in my neighborhood, other than the ones for city council candidates of whom I’m only vaguely aware. Part of me felt pleasantly surprised to see anything not pro-Trump in my mostly-conservative neck of the woods. This was followed by an immediate note of caution, urging me that however close to their sentiment I might fall on the political spectrum, we are, above all, not “aggressive yard sign people.” That is a different tribe.

A few days after that, I returned to the street on another walk and I saw that the house directly across the street from the one with the Trump For Prison sign had installed their own sign: a brand new “Trump/Vance: Make America Great Again” standee, red and blue text on a white field.

The two signs were now directly facing each other, like hockey players waiting for a puck to drop. There had been another family walking up the street when I noticed this new sign, a multi-generational-looking collection of adults, and as I continued on my way, I saw them stopping to look at it.

Ha, they must think this is funny too! I thought, partly impressed by their boldness to just stand there in front of the house taking pictures without worrying that the homeowner would see them (I also considered taking a picture, but only if I could do it inconspicuously).

It was around this point that I started to notice how long they’d been just standing in a front yard, milling about on the grass, and realized that they were probably the ones whose sign it was. They weren’t stopping to gawk, they were taking extra care to make sure that their Trump/Vance MAGA sign was properly installed. Framed in the ideal manner, and what have you. When you get in a yard sign fight, you don’t want to be the one with the sloppy sign. I tried to imagine them having dinner conversations, game planning how to properly demonstrate that libtards hadn’t totally taken over the neighborhood.

A few days after that, I was on another walk with the family, thinking I’d probably steal a picture of the dueling yard signs, assuming I had the chance between wrangling dog and toddler and (hopefully) not embarrassing my wife. Again I was thwarted, as one of the homeowners was, seemingly against all odds, once again outside at the very time we passed. This time, what looked to be a 50-something husband and wife were raising a new flag outside the Trump For Prison house. They were actually sharing the work load so perfectly — one of them up on a step ladder affixing flag to house, the other holding the ladder — that they looked like the cartoon people on an IKEA manual demonstrating the correct number of people who should be putting together your new desk or dresser or whatever (I’ve always done it alone, because IKEA furniture is mostly designed for alone people).

The new flag said:

NOT
****
AGAIN 2024

…with a slash through the O and a little Trump wig placed cockeyed on the O.

A fresh escalation! And with still more than a month to go before the actual election. One sign had become three over the course of barely a week. Who knows what the next six will bring? Will our neighborhood become a kitschy diner?

I’ve always been a massive fan of “celebrity neighbor feud” stories (I’m pretty sure there was a Celebrity Neighbor Feud tag on FilmDrunk), and now here I was, getting to live out my own non-celebrity version of it. To actually have been present while the neighbors were putting up (or had just put up) two of the three yard signs in question seems like me exaggerating for effect, but I assure you that I’m not. It really happened this way!

I guess what I enjoy so much about this is that the suburbs are ostensibly a place where politics don’t exist, where we can theoretically feel however we want about inflation and homelessness and the balance between government regulation and the free market so long as we come together to bring our garbage cans in on time and regularly cut our grass in the hopes of realizing the the shared dream of rising property values. Of course, they’re also a place where politics are the most turbo-charged. Where you don’t necessarily have to fall out over Trump like Alito’s psychotic wife, and can just as easily get drawn into blood feuds over guests parking in front of someone’s house or someone’s loud-ass dogs. The human capacity for coordinated action is matched only by our tendency to annoy the piss out of each other.

And the fact that these feuds so often seem to play out in the form of passive-aggressive yard signs… the sheer, gorgeous pettiness of it… each party literally knows where the other lives, and could just walk over there and give each other what for if they wanted, but there’s still a mutual, unspoken agreement that that would be taking things too far. Like the time I saw two of my drunk bro friends in college in San Diego get into a fight because one spilled jungle juice on the other’s new boardshorts, but they touched fists before they duked it out. Or that meme of the two dogs growling at each other across a gate who stop every time the gate opens.

We are all those two dogs, to some extent. And that’s a good thing! Who wants to risk getting their face all bit up just to bite someone’s face, even if they are an asshole whose guts you hate? Much easier and more civilized to just put up bitchy little signs. Yup, that’ll teach ‘em.